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Most biological organisms are designed incredibly badly. The body is full of spaghetti code, duplicate functionality, dead code that still causes bugs, and syst

Most biological organisms are designed incredibly badly. The body is full of spaghetti code, duplicate functionality, dead code that still causes bugs, and systems that evolved from a completely different purpose and didn't get the full rewrite they needed. You know, I hear tech people saying stuff like this all the time but the question I would ask is: designed badly compared to what? I mean, if you're comparing to software code made by humans (is there any other kind?) then I think biological systems work pretty damn well. The type of systems that humans write code for are utterly trivial compared to what biology has to deal with -- and we STILL have all the anti-patterns and problems you mentioned with respect to biology. Until human beings can write code of comparable complexity to life that lasts millions of years (forget about billions) I think you should show the woman some respect. :-)

yummyfajitas 15y ago
You know, I hear tech people saying stuff like this all the time but the question I would ask is: designed badly compared to what? Compared to what it would look like if a human designed it. I took a course in math biology, and learned how a few of these subsystems work. A particular gene regulatory network I studied (can't recall the details, it was >5 years ago) looked like the following: B, C = (False, False) A = get_input() if A: B = True if B: C = True if C: do_something_interesting() There were literally 2 pointless intermediary steps which evolution was pretty much incapable of removing. It was also unnecessary - in some different type of bacteria, the network fit the obvious pattern (I'd give a citation, but my math bio textbook is in a storage compartment halfway around the world from me): A = get_input() if A: do_something_interesting() You see nonsense like this all over biology. The debate over intelligent design is clearly over. If you want to argue for creationism, you need to argue that god is a drooling retard who starts a project, forgets what he is doing, and uses the pieces to finish a completely different task.
- Tichy 15y ago
  Not saying there isn't waste in nature, but in your A,B,C example, at least there are three more things were nature could break something if necessary. It can not only change the input to A, it can also change if A: B = true to if A: B = false, likewise for if B: C = true. Just saying, that kind of redundancy might be an advantage for evolution, smoothing it's path.

yummyfajitas 15y ago

You know, I hear tech people saying stuff like this all the time but the question I would ask is: designed badly compared to what? Compared to what it would look like if a human designed it. I took a course in math biology, and learned how a few of these subsystems work. A particular gene regulatory network I studied (can't recall the details, it was >5 years ago) looked like the following: B, C = (False, False) A = get_input() if A: B = True if B: C = True if C: do_something_interesting() There were literally 2 pointless intermediary steps which evolution was pretty much incapable of removing. It was also unnecessary - in some different type of bacteria, the network fit the obvious pattern (I'd give a citation, but my math bio textbook is in a storage compartment halfway around the world from me): A = get_input() if A: do_something_interesting() You see nonsense like this all over biology. The debate over intelligent design is clearly over. If you want to argue for creationism, you need to argue that god is a drooling retard who starts a project, forgets what he is doing, and uses the pieces to finish a completely different task.

Tichy 15y ago
Not saying there isn't waste in nature, but in your A,B,C example, at least there are three more things were nature could break something if necessary. It can not only change the input to A, it can also change if A: B = true to if A: B = false, likewise for if B: C = true. Just saying, that kind of redundancy might be an advantage for evolution, smoothing it's path.